The Somali terrorist who stabbed a Canadian police officer and ran over four pedestrians a few weeks ago entered the United States through the Mexican border and was released by Obama’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS), allowing him to continue his journey north. The ISIS operative, Abdulahi Hasan Sharif, was ordered deported, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokeswoman told various media outlets recently, but was released on an “order of supervision” and the feds never saw him again.

Sharif entered the U.S. in 2011 through the San Ysidro port of entry in California without documentation and was briefly held at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, a local newspaper reported. A year later he crossed the border into Canada and settled in Edmonton after being granted refugee status. On September 30 he slammed into an Edmonton police officer with his car then got out of the vehicle and repeatedly stabbed the cop with a knife. After fleeing the scene, Sharif stole a truck and deliberately mowed down four pedestrians. Canadian authorities found an ISIS flag in his car and have charged him with multiple counts of attempted murder, criminal flight causing bodily harm and possession of a weapon. Two years ago, Canadian authorities investigated the 30-year-old terrorist for espousing extremist views. It’s disturbing that Sharif’s northbound trek took him through the U.S.-Mexico border.

As part of an ongoing investigation into cartels, corruption and terrorism, Judicial Watch has for years reported that Islamic extremists are entering the country through Mexico and that ISIS is operating in border towns just miles from American cities. Judicial Watch launched the project in 2014 by exposing a sophisticated narco-terror ring with strong ties to ISIS and connections running from El Paso to Chicago to New York City. Two of the FBI’s most wanted were embroiled in the operation that also had deep ties to Mexico. Less than a year later, Judicial Watch reported that ISIS is operating in a Mexican border town just eight miles from El Paso, the result of Islamic terrorists joining forces with drug cartels and human smugglers knowns as “coyotes.”

When Judicial Watch reported that Mexican cartels were smuggling foreigners from countries with terrorist links into a small Texas rural town, federal authorities publicly denied the story was true. Never the less, high-level sources on both sides of the border confirmed to Judicial Watch that foreigners, classified as Special Interest Aliens (SIA), were being transported to stash areas in Acala, a rural crossroads located around 54 miles from El Paso on a state road – Highway 20. Once in the U.S., the SIAs waited for pick-up in the area’s sand hills just across Highway 20. At the time a Texas Department of Public Safety report leaked by the media had already confirmed that for years members of known Islamist terrorist organizations had been apprehended crossing the southern border.

Last year a high-ranking DHS official told Judicial Watch that Mexican drug traffickers help Islamic terrorists stationed in Mexico cross into the United States to explore targets for future attacks. Among the jihadists that travel back and forth through the porous southern border is a Kuwaiti named Shaykh Mahmood Omar Khabir, an ISIS operative who lives in the Mexican state of Chihuahua not far from El Paso. Khabir trained hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen and has lived in Mexico for more than a year, according to information provided by Judicial Watch’s government source. Now Khabir trains thousands of men—mostly Syrians and Yemenis—to fight in an ISIS base situated in the Mexico-U.S. border region near Ciudad Juárez, the intelligence gathered by Judicial Watch’s source reveals. Staking out U.S. targets is not difficult and Khabir actually bragged in an Italian newspaper article that the border region is so open that he “could get in with a handful of men, and kill thousands of people in Texas or in Arizona in the space of a few hours.” In the same article Mexico’s top diplomat, Foreign Affairs Secretary Claudia Ruiz, said “this new wave of fundamentalism could have nasty surprises in store for the United States.”

While much of the American mainstream media ignores that Sharif made it to Canada via the U.S.-Mexico border, it’s hardly surprising considering Islamic extremists have been infiltrating the country through the famously unprotected region for years. Referring to the recent Canadian attack, a think-tank dedicated to investigating the operations, funding, activities and front groups of Islamic extremists worldwide writes: “Fears about a terrorist using the U.S.-Mexican border as a gateway for an attack have been realized.”